Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday January 29, 2014 @07:59PM
from the year-of-linux-in-the-living-room dept.

monkeyhybrid writes "Following a tweet from the developer of Maia (a cross platform game soon to hit Steam) that Linux was bringing him more game sales than OS X. Gaming On Linux decided to investigate further by reaching out to multiple developers for platform sales statistics. Although the findings and developer comments show Linux sales to still be sitting in third place, behind those of OS X and Windows, they are showing promise. Developer feedback certainly appears to be positive about the platform's future. With Steam OS on its way, surely leading to more big title releases making their way to the Linux platform, could Linux gaming be set to take the number two spot from Apple?"

I'll become a gamer again if this happens. Just the idea of this makes me incredibly happy.

Linux is already the #2 gaming platform.

Don't wait to be happy.

SteamOS will be available for download very soon, and then you're going to see a lot start to happen. I'm already collecting components for my SteamBox. No, it's not going to be in the "living room" because playing games in the living room is for children. I play games at a desk with a captain's chair like God intended.

Plus, my wife won't let me connect my gaming computer to the big TV. You know how it goes, "happy wife, happy life". Anyway, once I get my Oculus Rift I won't need that big TV. It's easier to play in a room by myself because then nobody can see me making funny faces and sticking my tongue out with drool on my chin while I'm running and jumping through Steelport in nothing but a tattoos, a cowboy hat and high heels.

Even if you call Android a Linux platform, it's still WAY behind on what drives game development - revenue. The Xboxen, PS[34], GameBoy(s), Wii, iOS, etc are all orders of magnitude ahead on that front. Linux as a gaming platform is currently totally irrelevant, and with SteamOS will transition to mostly irrelevant.

But, please don't let that stop you! If availability of games on Linux allows just one more guy to jump around in a cowboy hat and high heels, it's still a net gain to

Which explains exactly *what* of relevance to geekoid's link? I mean, did you even look at it? It's a game, a big-budget currently-supported game, not made by Microsoft or Sony, that you can play on Linux PCs (not consoles)...

There are lots of others, too. For example, I play HoN (a DotA clone from the days before DotA2; I still prefer it over DotA2); they have a native Linux client. A bunch of Humble Bundle games have been released, those have Linux versions.

I never bothered to learn the ribbon UI but I don't really hate it. I rather enjoy the fact that it drove a few people to adopt OpenOffice.

I have used nothing but linux both personally and professionally for quite a few years. I have a vague and displeasing mistrust of closed source operating systems, which turns out to be well-justified.

As I understand what I've read, Steam OS allows the user to exit the Steam client, run GNOME, and install games from unknown sources. Android (both Google Play and Fire OS flavors) likewise lets users install games from unknown sources. The odd man out here is iOS.

If every Android phone had a button that dropped users into a GNOME shell, it would be disingenuous to call all Android devices Linux desktops.

What you describe is almost exactly what Canonical has been trying to achieve with "Ubuntu for Android", except with Unity instead of GNOME Shell. Plug your phone's HDMI out into a monitor and pair a Bluetooth keyboard, and you can use the phone as if it were a (somewhat underpowered) desktop computer. And from what I've seen of AOSP 2.2 on my Archos 43 Internet Tablet, the device's touch screen would become a trackpad.

This thing is meant to be a gaming console, and if it's even a _halfway_ decent one, almost nobody will use that button.

How "halfway decent" it is depends on two things: 1. how many worthwhile games Valve can

What is promissing is that any game that would be running under SteamOS could also run under Ubuntu, a general purpose distribution for which you can install many desktop applications. You cannot do that on Android or iOS.

That would be kind of nice, but will it make "Linux" (i.e. Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.) into a major gaming platform? There are people who run Linux as their major desktop and keep a Windows partition around for gaming but is that a large market?

I think Steam OS has a decent shot at being successful, but is it fair to call a machine running Steam OS a Linux machine? I don't think so (unless you want to call Android a Linux machine as well) and if that's the case, then no, I don't think Linux will become the #2 g

It's a variant of Linux but it's not for use with a general purpose computer.

Oh yeah? My kids aren't complaining, and neither are theirs. Likewise the many thousands of others who've already downloaded and installed Ye Olde Steam OS [github.com]. and yes, those boxes are still desktop machines, they just hook up to the CatLeap in the lounge room when gaming (Steam is just an interface, nothing to stop you having the desktops of your choice installed on the same box - no need to dual boot.

Q: Didn't you tell me to develop for Ubuntu? Do I need to install Debian to build for SteamOS?A: All Steam applications execute using the Steam Runtime which is a fixed binary-compatibility layer for Linux applications. This enables any application to run on any Linux distribution that supports the Steam Runtime without recompiling.

..there isn't much holding me back from dumping Windows all together so seeing that Linux as a viable gaming platform is on the rise it shouldn't be too much longer before I can dump it all together and go full Linux. Sure Linux has Wine support but I would prefer to have native support instead.

Sure Linux has Wine support but I would prefer to have native support instead.

Wine is not an emulator but a reimplementation of the Win32 API. So long as the developer of a video game or other application tests its product on Wine, it's just another toolkit, just as GTK+ and Qt and SDL are toolkits. In such a case, I don't see how an app running in Wine is any less "native" than, say, a Qt app running on a GTK+-based distribution. If you complain instead that not enough developers and publishers of games designed for Windows care about Wine compatibility, I can agree with that complaint though. Is that what you're trying to say?

Yah. I haven't checked lately but I remember for a while it could be a pain in the butt to get games to work on Wine because developers didn't care about Wine support. Hopefully with Linux moving up now they could at least get the ball rolling on Wine compatibility.

To keep this debate from collapsing into one of definitions [c2.com], I'll offer some. In the retro-gaming community, an "emulator" simulates the operation of an entire computer, using an interpreter or dynamic recompiler to simulate the CPU. This emulator imposes a substantial performance penalty. For example, DOSBox and Bochs are emulators. Wine, on the other hand, is just a set of libraries that run on your existing machine; the application's code runs natively. VirtualBox and VMware are somewhere in the middle as "virtual machine monitors", which execute unprivileged code directly and recompile privileged code into the same instruction set but without use of privileged instructions.

Let me put it another way: If you think Wine is an emulator, then Qt is an emulator too if I install it on a GTK+ based distribution like Ubuntu or Xubuntu, and GTK+ is an emulator if I install it on Kubuntu.

It doesn't even meet the POSIX specs which would be required (it ignores part of that just because they don't really make any sense).

Since a version of Linux was certified to meet the Single Unix Spec (SUS) years ago, simply by adding STREAMs (which Linus has refused to add to the mainstream kernel for good reason), and since SUS is far stricter than POSIX, I doubt this. (Also, STREAMs were made optional in more recent versions of the SUS, so any random vanilla Linux system might well be certifiable as a True Unix(tm) today, if anyone actually cared.)

I suspect you are A) getting your standards mixed up, and B) relying on out-of-date info

if you have a software library that exposes an interface, and you re-implement the library conforming to the same interface, NO ONE would say you just emulated the interface.

people are using the technical definition of an emulator, not the general purpose one you are pulling from the dictionary. you are free to use the general purpose one, but you aren't speaking the same language as every one else in this discussion.

There are at least two reasons that OP is saying that Wine is not "native." The first is that not all libraries that programs expect are implemented (the vast majority of the most frequently used ones are, but there are a TON that are basically never used; unfortunately these libraries are available on native Windows, but not Wine).

Then developers should test their apps in Wine and report failures in these unimplemented APIs to the Wine developers.

The second reason has to do with graphics performance, specifically for DirectX.

I thought the only games for Windows that had to use DirectX were Windows Phone games, Windows RT games, and Windows 8 games sold as Windows Store apps. Otherwise, the developer can use OpenGL, unless the developer never plans to port the game to any platform other than Windows family and Xbox family.

Yes but "enough users" is a milestone that may take a decade or more to reach, even with SteamOS.And it does nothing to support older games, a game segment that is growing every day. There aren't any obsolete games really. Subjectively, a lot of players think older games are superior to the latest batch coming out.

..there isn't much holding me back from dumping Windows all together so seeing that Linux as a viable gaming platform is on the rise it shouldn't be too much longer before I can dump it all together and go full Linux. Sure Linux has Wine support but I would prefer to have native support instead.

This is a very common opinion. However the problem is that switching from Windows to Linux does not really help the developer. The developer replaced a Windows sale with a Linux sale. Basically Linux will largely cannibalize Windows sales. So the justification to the developer for doing a Linux version has to go beyond simply the number of Linux sales.

For a small and not-well-known developer this benefit may be greater exposure and word of mouth. For the large established developer the benefits for a Li

Not for games designed around the 2 to 4 controllers and large monitor in a living room. Only a tiny number of people [slashdot.org] have put together a living room gaming PC running Windows. The Steam Machines, on the other hand, are designed for the living room in order to make it easier for developers to get controller-friendly games out to the public with less overhead and less red tape than the consoles.

..there isn't much holding me back from dumping Windows all together so seeing that Linux as a viable gaming platform is on the rise it shouldn't be too much longer before I can dump it all together and go full Linux. Sure Linux has Wine support but I would prefer to have native support instead.

Games are pretty much the only thing keeping me on Windows.

Linux, OSX/IOS, Android. Games are pretty much the only thing I do that cant be effectively done though a browser or are generic enough to have programs to perform the same thing on all platforms.

That would be wrong. Alpha is where you begin testing, whether or not all of the final functionality is present. Software is usually considered in beta when it is feature-complete - this implies that in any prior stage, it may not be feature-complete. By your definition, Maia is pre-alpha; by the widely-accepted definition, Maia is alpha.

I wasn't going for the stereotype. Rather, I was emphasizing that the software is in such an early stage of development that your typical Windows user is far less likely to buy the product than a typical Linux user. This isn't something you'd find in Steam's early access section, it's something you would normally find only on the computer of a developer who just started building the game.

To put in perspective just how early in development this game is, they have a few things you can build (less than 10 tota

The problem is that Linux still needs a baseline distro for developers to target. Ubuntu had a lot of promise until the last few years where it's been shifted to target every device *except* desktops. Not to mention the weird shit they've been pushing like ads in the OS.

I'd really like to see something to the effect of a Linux Gaming Standard, where as long as certain structural conditions are met within any given distro, developers could simply target those standards and build their rpm/deb packages and not have to worry about supporting Ubuntu specifically. I'm talking things like specific libraries and drivers that need to be present for "Linux Gaming Standard" certification, so that people aren't having to worry about hunting down the right repo by blindly copy/pasting some forum suggestion for someone else into their terminal hoping to make magic happen.

SteamOS could be just that. If it gains large popularity all the other distro's will want to make sure that they include everything the SteamOS uses for playing games so they can have access to that library of software.

SteamOS would become the Linux Gaming Standard that you want, it will just be called SteamOS Compatible.

John Carmack has talked, in the past, about the insane difficulty of packaging games for Linux. There are so many distros out there. Well, SteamOS solves that problem.

I predict that game developers who support SteamOS will not accept bug reports filed against any other distro; instead they will tell the user "it runs fine on SteamOS, so tell your distro it needs to get compatible."

I am fine with the above, as long as SteamOS is free and open. Well, it is. So I think this is the best possible news for Linux gaming.

The premise here is a bit odd. Windows is the obvious #1 platform on PC but the #2 Mac doesn't have a close second to Windows globally. Taking 2nd place here isn't very hard. There aren't even many desktop OSes capable of running modern games now. I also though Linux wasn't a "platform" since it isn't an OS, its the kernel. Anyhow, given the small number of desktop gaming OSes, it won't be hard to be #3 or #4. Unless I'm mistaken. Maybe there are a lot of gamers using DOS, OS/2, Solaris, BSD, BeOS, QNX....

Linux is GPL 2.0. General Public License 2.0 does not have the "2.0 or any greater version clause" so Linux can't have a viral open source lock-down like GPL 3.0 and Linus Torvalds doesn't seem interested or able (the contributions to GPL 2.0 *cannot be relicensed to GPL 2.1 or GPL 3.0*

I mentioned discussed TIVOization and how NVIDIA can easily within their rights publish closed-sourced drivers for Linux. Android is open source, but certain key apps like Gmail, Maps, Google Play are closed sourced (this was a recent article here).

Debian is GPL 2 as well, I figure you know this but from your comment I can't tell and it isn't clear if you understand the licenses but you could Google and see why and how changes to the GPL have been made over time.

SteamOS may or may not require some hooks in the kernel. Personally I don't care, and I love my Tivo, but some people may freak out over the loss of "freedom". But when it comes to Steam the battle for freedom has been lost anyway as it is a major source of DRM and publisher control in computer games. Even if SteamOS has no hooks into the kernel and is a pure application, it still makes Tivoization seem like a minor quibble in comparison.

The only major game development tool that I know of so far which can create games for Linux is Unity3D, and it doesn't even run under Linux, and so is very unlikely to result in any Linux-exclusive games, If the developer already has windows or a mac, and they are making a desktop version of a game anyways, even if they ultimately intend to support Linux, they are almost always going to target their own native platform first.

Exclusive content is important if there's ever to be any large scale adoption e

Apples and oranges. PS4 and PS3 aren't desktop OS's.... Linux is a desktop platform, so are OSX and Windows. It makes absolutely no sense that you need to have Windows or OSX to develop games for Linux.

Hey., I'm not saying its bad that they target Linux... I'm saying that targeting Linux without actually having the development environment work on Linux is really shooting the whole notion in the foot. For most people that even care about it, the fact that Unity3D can target Linux is liable to matter only to people who don't use windows or osx in the first place. a group that can't possibly even develop with it because the software needs OSX or windows anyways.

is what Steam should have gone with if they insist on doing this venture (which I decidedly think is a solution searching for a problem). FreeBSD is good enough for Playstation and Sony seems to know what they are doing when it comes to consoles and gaming.

FreeBSD would be a little stupid. I love BSD, but it lacks driver support for video cards. SteamOS has to support multiple different hardware configurations so going with Linux makes much more sense. Sony is a special case because they are in a position to standardize on a single hardware configuration. For them, BSD should be great.

Now I grant that the games in the sales statistics are mostly indie games, not a list of top level titles. But the sales revenue percentage from Linux ranged from 1-6%, which is much better than I expected.

But I have a hard time seeing SteamOS get much of a foothold. I would love to be proven wrong. But it has got a weaker selection of big name games than the competing consoles are expected to get, and a weaker selection of big name games than the Windows version of Steam will have, and most of the h

I agree with you in the short term, but I think Valve is playing a long game here. The current Steamboxes are inferior to consoles, but in a few years when you can get a Steambox with better specs and the consoles haven't changed it may be a different story. And when the next generation of consoles doesn't have backwards compatibility, but Steamboxes do, the game selection problem will be gone. If they're targeting for the long term, they don't need all the secondary services right away; they need the ba

IMO, it's pretty childish to carry on about whether Linux is beating Max OS X in game sales, or which platform has the bigger market-share.

The reality of things is, OS X game development has always lagged far behind Windows because so many developers got behind Microsoft's Direct-X and didn't opt to code for OpenGL. In those cases, the only time you got a Mac release was when one of the Mac only companies deemed the game worthy of doing a ground-up conversion of the code to make it OS X compatible. (Aspyr a

I still have a core 2 duo laptop with one of the broken nvidia gpus. For about two years there any laptop with a nvidia chip would eventually fail. Nvidia settled quickly so many people didn't find out about the class action lawsuit until their laptop broke and by then it was too late. Not that it mattered much, the most nvidia offered was a Eee PC netbook to compensate them for their broken Alienware laptops.

But how would buyers of an AMD-powered Steam Machine be in any worse of a position than, say, console buyers? PlayStation 4 uses AMD graphics, Xbox One uses AMD graphics, and Wii U uses AMD graphics. The odd man out is OUYA, which has NVIDIA Tegra 3 graphics; is it even doing better than the Wii U?

Funny that. I have an AMD graphics card in my gaming Linux system, with Steam, and it works pretty well. AMD's driver support has sucked (and I built the system before I switched the gaming system over to Linux), but with the current experimental drivers it's actually pretty good. I have not noticed any problems with any of my games.

AMD is working with Valve to produce driver improvements, so I would expect that things to continue improving.

Annoyingly, you'd be able to use discrete graphics cards with any modern Mac if Apple would stop refusing to license thunderbolt PCIe bays. Benchmarks (via enthusiasts hacking together solutions) show that even a Macbook Air can provide good gaming performance (5x or more the framerate of the iGPU) when connected to a high-end graphics card via Thunderbolt (even on the internal display). Since Apple refuses to license them, however, you're restricted to doing it under bootcamp with expensive enterprise-targeted enclosures.

In other words, there is no technical reason why you couldn't simply plug an external discrete GPU into any Mac and instantly get massively improved gaming performance. Apple is actively blocking such things.

"Massively improved gaming performance"? Is that true? I thought the conventional wisdom on external GPUs is that they were a waste of money even on PCs. For roughly the same amount as the external GPU, you could just build a gaming rig that would be comparable to the external + PC.

Let me state clearly that I have no idea of how true that is, I don't know hardware. Just that the last time I looked into it for my laptop, I was quickly convinced it was not a good idea.

Sorry to double-reply here, but I thought I'd point out that one difference between previous external GPUs and what we're talking about here is the interface. Lots of previous solutions are using USB, which is a very resource intensive and low-speed interface. Thunderbolt is basically just PCI-Express over a cable, so when you route a PCI-Express graphics card over Thunderbolt, the PC and graphics card can communicate in their originally intended form. There is indeed a big drop in bandwidth because you're

"The OWC Mercury Helios PCIe Expansion Chassis gives users of Thunderboltâ port equipped computers including the Apple Mac mini, iMac, and MacBook the ability to tap into a wide variety of professional-level performance PCIe adapters that were once the sole domain of desktop workstations. Helios utilizes any half-length PCIe 2.0 card (up to 6.5") to provide

Apple is responsible for licensing accessories for OS X, regardless of what connection mechanism they use. Considering that such a solution would likely require driver support to work under OS X, that's relevant.

You can see the benchmarks there for yourself. External monitor benchmarks are higher, probably because of the extra copying that has to go on to use the internal monitor. As an example, the first guy on an 11" 2013 macbook air got 69 FPS running Bioshock Infinite on max settings at 1366x768 (versus 15 FPS on the stock iGPU), and the second guy reported running Battlefield 3 on "Ultra" quality at 40FPS at 1920x1080.

Is there a big performance hit from doing all this, including using a dual-core ultrabook-class CPU? Sure, but it's hard to argue that the results aren't playable. It certainly proves the concept, and a properly supported solution at an affordable price could make one hell of an improvement to a notebook docking solution. Having the portability of an ultrabook, but docking it at home to your home monitor/speakers/mouse/keyboard/storage/network/etc? That'd be pretty nice. For many people, it might obviate the need to have both a desktop for gaming and a notebook for portability.

I am a bit of an apple fan, all the way back to using Apple IIs' in High School, and I have to say it, Macs are no good for gaming. Yes, I know there are a few games; but, nothing near the PC quantity.

I do not see that as a big problem, I probably should be reading a book rather than playing a game anyways; and, there are enough games, just not as many. It is just that, contrary to the popular misconception, the apple is much more of a business computer than the PC. No, I am not one of the "rich elite" I am

My experience differs. I have Xubuntu 12.04 LTS on my laptop and Xubuntu 12.04 LTS on my grandmother's decade-old desktop PC. Sure, Alt+SysRq+REISUB makes panic shutdowns cleaner, but if sudden loss of power rendered the operating system unbootable, you wouldn't be able to read the comment that I'm typing right now on the laptop.

Then let me try to rephrase the other Anonymous Coward's comment the way I understood it: "Linux is still incredibly unusable on the desktop due to many of these little stupid bugs that regular people shouldn't have to bother with. It's too developer-centric and not enough inexperienced-user-centric." Steam Machines are supposed to compete with the major video game consoles, which are designed from the ground up for inexperienced users [pineight.com].

The major consoles aren't personal computers (PCs) because they don't let the person who owns it control the computing done on it. So currently it's Windows, OS X, and then GNU/Linux, and the featured article suggests that GNU/Linux is set to overtake OS X soon.